„A call to arms“ by Yukio Mishima

„Ars Magna“ editions, Nantes, 2021, pp.31

Once again Christian Bouchet amazes us with this new work published by his house „Ars Magna“. We were fans of Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) since reading his novel „Confessions of a Mask“ (1949) translated into Greek. This time Bouchet has selected the text that was read by the author himself before his „seppuku“, which means nationalist suicide. This text was unpublished in French and this edition fills the author's French bibliography.

With a very detailed introduction written by Georges Feltin-Tracol on the political and artistic stages of the founder of the Society of the Shield in 1968, we discover an impressive and very suggestive speech (with a lot of innuendos) which has been abandoned for fifty years „at the office of the General of the Eastern Division of the Land Self-Defense Force of Japan at the Ichigaya military base, Tokyo“ (op.cit.page 17).

Again there is not the name of the translator mentioned at the beginning and so we are sure that Bouchet did this translation but from English (not Japanese). Yet the result is strong, even if we are sometimes forced to resort to the internet for Japanese terms left without translation. „In Japan, the military is castrated and manipulated by perfidious and capricious politicians“ (op.cit.page 25). Mishima advances to us at the end the equivocal and ambiguous sentence that this date of his seppuku is the one which sounds „the Showa era“ (page 27) (term left without translation). We had hesitated to understand the meaning but finally we understood why Bouchet left this term without translation: he wanted his readers to make the link with the Hebrew (this time) term: the Shoah! With a new Shoah we will cover the wounds of the defeat in 1945!

written by Dionysos Andornis